thespaceinvader wrote:Which is precisely why it probably saves memory just to make and ship the small versions.

I'd still argue that we could probably make a help GUI that invalidated the need for them at all, though.

Well, I didn't quite get on my point very well there; I'm more-so getting at that Wesnoth is fairly large on itself, maybe not as large as other games, but for slow internet speed, it can be a problem.

Adding a lot of features to save memory can be useless, as it MAY cost the same as whats saved itself. This is more my point then anything else. Although this is for future reference then anything else...

kitty wrote:Hmm, there are definitely visible differences between my and tsi's versions of the portraits and the ones you generated. But honestly the differences don't look too bad to me. I'd like to hear what the other portrait artists have to say to this minimal quality loss. I think I could live with it.

IMHO this is no practical degradation of the players experience if we went with these across the board. For what it's worth, i support it.

The time saved from making and managing the small portraits will probably eventually add up to more more new/improved portraits that if we continue as we are.

Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.-> What i might be working onAttempting Lucidity

Now I realize that that references external code, but bear with me for a few more numbers. Together, all of our current image manipulation functions are 10.2kb. Now the smallest small-style portrait I could find is the bat at 20.1kb. They average far closer to 50-60kb. So again; I find it impossible to believe that we actually make Wesnoth bigger by adding ~sharpen() and whatever the artists need and removing the small black portraits.

OTOH, the small black portraits only account for 6.5mb of Wesnoth's download size, so I'm not entirely sure that's even worth it. Even assuming that a year from now we have twice as many small black portraits it's still only a drop in the bucket.

DEATH_is_undead wrote:Remember every tool you wish to use on your art has to be in Wesnoth's game engine, which will take about one of the portrait's saved memory itself.

This feature is not really a “tool”, but more of a series of bugfixes and improvements upon features that have existed for many stable series already. The resulting object code is nothing compared to template-heavy code such as the AI modules.

Bottom line: refrain from posting on subjects you don’t know about, especially on a working thread. I’m moving this to Developers’ Discussions to avoid further noise.

On a slightly off-topic note, we really, desperately need to figure out a better layout for these unit info screens where these black-backgrounded portraits get used. Our current presentation is just horrendous - especially with the vertically stacked portraits.